Swamped

I’ve been totally swamped by kind messages following my posting with news of my resignation on Friday, and I will be spending my morning trying to answer the 400-odd e-mails I’ve received before I head to a lunch.

It’s been really extremely flattering to receive so many messages of support, both from people inside the company and outside; and both from those I have always known to be good friends, and from others who have traditionally been on the other side of the divide from me.

Tim Ryan, who famously once tried to get me arrested in Australia on the grounds that I was apparently running an illegal gambling operation (a blog for the future, perhaps), sent a note wishing me good luck; and first on the telephone at 9am was Ralph Topping to say all the best.

Wags will doubtless suggest that he was calling in delight at seeing the back of me, but nothing could be further from the truth: in fact, he was extremely kind and generous in his assessment of my Betfair career. Not that that surprises me about him: Ralph was the subject of one of my unpublished posts from my back catalogue, which I have today posted here. Another old post which I couldn’t publish previously has gone up here.

So, the first working day of my post-Betfair career is going to be an even more e-mail-filled one than was my time spent there. Which means, not a lot of time to blog. We’ll save that for later in the week.

[...] rather far-fetched, you might think. Except that something not dissimilar happened to me once (as I alluded to recently), when I was in Australia – way back in 2003, before I lived there, when I was just visiting [...]